Social networking applications such as Facebook®, MySpace®, and Bebo®, etc, all store information about people. Information is stored via means of a person's social network contact list. A contact list is a list of people that a person ‘knows’ and hence wishes to interact with via the social networking application.
A problem may occur when a third party developed application (i.e. one not provided by the social networking application that is to be interacted with) needs to interact with one or more social networking applications in order to provide a service, because it is not always possible for the third party application to obtain all of the information that is required to provide its service. have the same list of contacts as the contact list stored by the social networking application.